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But if perception does not go by impression, what is the
process?
The mind affirms something not contained within it: this is
precisely the characteristic of a power- not to accept impression
but, within its allotted sphere, to act.
Besides, the very condition of the mind being able to exercise
discrimination upon what it is to see and hear is not, of course,
that these objects be equally impressions made upon it; on the
contrary, there must be no impressions, nothing to which the mind
is passive; there can be only acts of that in which the objects
become known.
Our tendency is to think of any of the faculties as unable to
know its appropriate object by its own uncompelled act; to us it
seems to submit to its environment rather than simply to perceive
it, though in reality it is the master, not the victim.
As with sight, so with hearing. It is the air which takes the
impression, a kind of articulated stroke which may be compared to
letters traced upon it by the object causing the sound; but it
belongs to the faculty, and the soul-essence, to read the
imprints thus appearing before it, as they reach the point at
which they become matter of its knowledge.
In taste and smell also we distinguish between the impressions
received and the sensations and judgements; these last are mental
acts, and belong to an order apart from the experiences upon
which they are exercised.
The knowing of the things belonging to the Intellectual is not in
any such degree attended by impact or impression: they come
forward, on the contrary, as from within, unlike the
sense-objects known as from without: they have more emphatically
the character of acts; they are acts in the stricter sense, for
their origin is in the soul, and every concept of this
Intellectual order is the soul about its Act.
Whether, in this self-vision, the soul is a duality and views
itself as from the outside- while seeing the
Intellectual-Principal as a unity, and itself with the
Intellectual-Principle as a unity- this question is investigated
elsewhere.
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